


A New Friend Just When You Need One

by BlueGirl22



Category: Spring Awakening - Sheik/Sater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst with a Happy Ending, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Panic Attacks, SO sorry for making you theater kids read about video games for any length of time, hanschen helping moritz out with a sudden issue and it's all okay in the end. ya know how it is., it couldn't be avoided, reference to past suicide attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-09
Updated: 2020-03-09
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:28:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23084788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueGirl22/pseuds/BlueGirl22
Summary: The last thing Moritz wanted to do was to get triggered by a video game and start having a panic attack in his standoffish classmate's sitting room, but the universe doesn't often consider what it is he wants. The last thing Hanschen wanted to do was to have to care about the emotional and physical well being of his awkward classmate, but the universe isn't given to taking his wants into consideration, either. Both cross their own boundaries before the evening is out, for better or for worse.
Relationships: Hanschen Rilow & Moritz Stiefel
Comments: 7
Kudos: 41





	A New Friend Just When You Need One

_I wish I’d taken French,_ thought Moritz for about the thirtieth time since setting off for Hanschen’s house. This had been the longest hour of his life, but finally he found himself walking up to the building that Google maps had identified for him earlier. _At least Ilse and Wendla take French. I wouldn’t have to do group projects with the charitable soul of the week if I took French._

He climbed up the stairs and knocked on the door. There was a sound of nearing footsteps from inside, and Hanschen Rilow swung open the door, assuaging Moritz’s lingering fear that he’d come to the wrong house.

Hanschen gave Moritz a once-over and stepped aside. “I was expecting you at the other door, we don’t use this one.”

“Oh, sorry.” Moritz walked through the door frame, trying not to let show how heavily he was breathing. 

“You were due ten minutes ago,” said Hanschen, looking down at his watch.

“I know, sorry. The route here was more uphill than I thought it would be.”

Hanschen closed the door and squinted at Moritz. “You walked here?”

“Yes?”

“In the middle of the day?”

“Yes."

“Why would you-” Hanschen shook his head- “Actually, I just realized I don’t care, don’t tell me. Ready to start working? This is due Wednesday.”

 _I know, I heard the teacher say the exact same thing you did,_ Moritz thought. “Yep, I’m ready.”

* * *

 _I wish I’d taken French,_ thought Moritz _._ Nothing in particular had sparked his train of thought this time, he had just become intensely aware of how uncomfortable he felt trying to look natural while perched on a wooden chair in the foreign sitting room of a classmate whose middle name he didn’t even know.

Hanschen cleared his throat and looked up from his notebook. “What currency do they use in Ecuador?”

Moritz plugged the question into his laptop. “USD.”

“Huh.” Hanschen made a note. “What’re you looking at?”

Moritz realized his vague staring into space looked like he was focused intensely on the bookshelf across the room. “Oh, just, um, trying to make out the titles.”

“Oh.”

“Books are really cool.”

“Yeah, they’re not mine.”

“Cool,” Moritz said, while wanting to drop a very large anvil on his own feet. “What do _you_ like to read?”

“Oh, stuff. Some fiction, some nonfiction. Whatever.”

 _God I hate this._ “Me too.”

A pregnant pause. Hanschen tapped his pencil on his paper and let his head roll back on his shoulders. “Jesus, this is so boring.”

Moritz forced a laugh. “I know right.”

Hanschen put the notepad down beside him, seemingly resigned to taking a break, but offered no other word.

Moritz looked around the room some more, squinting at the bottom row of the bookshelf. “What’s in that box?”

Hanschen twisted to see. “Oh that? VR headset. I put one on my Christmas list a while back and I got like three from different family members. That’s the one I kept. It’s fun, but I haven’t really used it since I got it.”

“Oh.” Moritz’s eyes were wide. He bit his lip. “What’s it like?”

“Well it’s not _nearly_ as good as other models, but it gets the job done. My uncle has a huge set up that takes up like an entire room and the graphics on it are _amazing._ ”

Moritz kept staring at the box. Hanschen noticed.

“Do you want to try it?”

Moritz nodded quickly.

Hanschen stood up. “Sure, why not?”

* * *

“I keep wanting to give you pointers but you are _weirdly_ good at this,” said Hanschen, looking at his phone display of what was happening in the game.

Moritz smiled, his eyes covered by the goggles. “Thanks.” There was the shattering sound of another one of the faceless enemies dying. “What’s this called again?”

“ _Superhot_.” Hanschen bit into an apple and almost choked on it as Moritz cleared another room in a breathtaking single swoop. “Dude, it took me five tries to get that, what the hell? You must have some unholy rage inside you.”

“This is so fun, how do you not just do this all time?”

“Me? I _suck_ at this. I suck _spectacularly_ at this. I’d _absolutely_ play all the time if I were like you, though.”

Moritz shot more pretend enemies with the pretend pistol, spinning in a slow circle while standing in the middle of the room. “I think this is the first time I’ve ever been better than anyone at anything in my life.”

Hanschen snickered. “No, wait, look out you’re gonna-”

A shattering sound. “Goddammit,” said Moritz, his posture deflating. “Back to the start again.”

“Hey, at least you know about it for next time. Keep up the good work.” Hanschen put his phone down, picked up his notebook again, and started idly filling in some more of the project worksheet while Moritz worked his way back up the levels.

“AH, there we go,” said Moritz, several minutes later. “Managed to not make the same mistake!”

“Good job.” Hanschen flipped over his phone screen to see which room Moritz was in now. It was empty except for a gun and some text hanging in midair. “Wanna get back to work after this? This is the last part.”

“Sure.” Mortiz stepped forward and picked up the phantom weapon, then looked up at the text. “It just says ‘aim for the head.’”

“Yep.”

He spun in a circle. “Are the creatures not loading?”

Hanschen shook his head despite knowing Moritz couldn’t see him. “There’s only one person in there.”

“‘Aim for the head.’” Moritz looked down at his hand. “Oh. It wants me to…”

“Correct.”

“Oh. That’s fine, then.” Slowly, he set his right hand to his temple. “I never really noticed how, how, um, lifelike this feels.”

“The controllers vibrating when you shoot is a nice touch. Now get going, we have work to do.”

“Sure, right, I’ll just…” Moritz stood there for a few seconds, not moving. Actually, he _was_ moving a little bit. Hanschen could just see his hand trembling, almost imperceptibly.

“Hey, are you okay?”

No reaction for a moment. 

Moritz clicked the trigger button, and Hanschen heard a shattering sound.

Very quickly, Moritz whipped off the headset and controller wrist straps like they were burning his skin. His eyes were red. “I’ll, uh, be back in a second, I need to use your bathroom, or, y’know, or something,” he stammered out, quickly running out of the room.

For a minute, Hanschen kept his position on the sofa, considering the situation. He put down his papers and craned his neck around the door frame in the direction of the bathroom. “Moritz?”

No response.

“Moritz?”

Nothing.

Cautiously, Hanschen slunk down the hallway to the bathroom door. It was ajar, so he pushed it the rest of the way open. He scanned the room, at first seeing nothing, but then tilted his face downward. Moritz was sitting on the floor, his back against the bathtub, his knees pulled up to his chest, and his arms around his head, taking labored heavy breaths and rocking ever so slightly back and forth.

 _Oh no,_ thought Hanschen, kneeling down. “Moritz? Moritz are you okay, can you hear me?”

Slowly, he nodded.

“Can you tell me what’s going on?”

He shook his head.

Hanschen took out his phone. “Okay Google, how to help someone who’s having a panic attack?” He looked down and read the first few bullet points. “Moritz, has this happened before?”

A nod.

“Do you have any medication that you take for it?”

A shake.

“Okay, okay.” He put the phone down and put his hand on Moritz’s shoulder. “Is it alright if I do this?”

A nod.

He squeezed Moritz’s shoulder. “I’m right here, it’s alright, you have nothing to worry about. This’ll be over in a few minutes. Is it okay if I keep talking?”

Moritz made an “mm hmm” sound.

“I’m going to start counting backwards from ten. Try and breathe to the rhythm. Ready? Okay. Ten… nine… eight…”

“S-seven,” Moritz whispered.

Hanschen smiled. “Six… five…”

“Four.”

“Three.”

“Two.”

“And one. Can we do that again? Ten.”

“Nine…”

They got back down to one, alternating numbers. By that time, Moritz’s breathing had evened out a little, and Hanschen thought he looked a somewhat more with it. He stood up and offered a hand. “Can you get up?”

Moritz nodded and took Hanschen’s arm, pulling himself to his feet.

“Good.” Slowly, Hanschen led Moritz out to the kitchen, sat him in a chair, and started making tea. He put a mug in front of him, and Moritz wrapped his hands around it. Hanschen watched as he took a sip and placed it back in the counter top with a _clink._ “Do you want to talk about it?”

Moritz laced his finger together. “Not right now. Maybe later. I assume you want an explanation.”

Hanschen sighed. “If you must, I don’t really…” he stopped mid-sentence.

“What?”

He sat down in a chair across from Moritz. “I was going to say ‘I don’t really care,’ but that’s not true. I _do_ care, I _do_ wanna know, but take it in your own time. You don’t have to say if you really don’t want to.”

“Thank you.” A beat. “I don’t know what to do now.”

“One sec.” Hanschen briefly left the room and came back with his laptop. “Do you watch _The Good Place_?”

Moritz nodded.

Hanschen pulled up Netflix and set the computer up at the edge of the table. “I’ll pick an episode.” He pressed play and they were greeted with the image of Eleanor staring glumly at the “Welcome! Everything is fine” banner.

About an hour passed in relative calm. Hanschen got up to make popcorn at one point, but for the most part they just sat chuckling at the screen with their forearms on the table. An episode came to a close with Chidi making his best confused face at Janet and Jianyu, and Moritz reached out his hand and pressed the spacebar, stopping the autoplay’s forward march.

“I’m ready to talk.”

Hanschen straightened up in his seat. “Please, go ahead.”

“It’s kinda heavy.” 

“That’s fine.”

“Alright.” Moritz took a deep breath and folded his hands on the table. “So, I have episodes, sometimes. Low points, and for a few weeks I stop being able to think right. Nothing looks like it can ever get better, I can’t really function, and, y’know, whatever. It’s like I forget that life doesn’t look like that all the time.”

“Depressive episodes.”

He looked up through his eyelashes. “Yeah, those.”

“I’m taking psych at the moment, I know the vocab. Sorry, keep going.”

“Okay.” He picked at one of his fingernails. “A couple of months ago, in winter, it all sort of, I dunno, came to a head. Something stupid set me off, it might have been a bad test grade or something, I can’t remember, but I got real sad and angry about it and I, I, uh, I walked out into the woods with a gun in my pocket.”

“Oh, _shit-_ ”

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” Moritz assured quickly, “I wasn’t hurt or anything. I didn’t see at the time, but Ilse had followed me out there, and she like-” he laughed a little- “she straight up body checked me when she saw I was about to do something. Bullet went into a tree trunk, and I spent a week in a psych ward.”

“Jesus, I didn’t know. Moritz, I’m sorry-”

“It’s fine, no one does. I mean, Ilse and-” he took a deep breath- “ _my parents_ do, and I think Melchior’s basically figured it out, but no one else. But, uh, anyway, I’ve been doing better lately and I don’t… want to do _that..._ anymore, but when the game had me put a gun to my head, it like, did something to my brain and suddenly I felt like I was back out there in the December dusk, kneeling in the snow again.”

“I see.” Hanschen extended a cautious hand and rested his fingers on Moritz’s wrist. “You haven’t even told Melchior? I thought he was, like, your best friend.”

“No, no, he is.” Moritz looked down at where Hanschen’s hand touched his. “But it’s not the most natural thing to work into conversation.” He laughed. “You can’t always rely on yourself to have a conversation-opening panic attack.”

Hanschen didn’t react.

“Please laugh, that was a joke. I don’t try them that often.”

That did make Hanschen giggle a little bit. He considered what might be best to say next. “Thank you for telling me.”

“Thank you for listening. And for helping with the attack.”

“Sure thing.” Hanschen idly checked his watch. “Not to break the conversation in a weird place, but it’s getting kinda late. If you’re feeling better, I can drive you home. That is, if you want me to. We can do the rest of the project in class.”

Moritz’s eyes flashed with a hint of happy surprise. “Yes, thank you, I really don’t like walking in the dark.”

The pair went out to Hanschen’s car, and the drive passed in a calm quiet. Moritz pointed to his house when they got to his street, and the vehicle came to a slow stop. He opened the car door, but before he could step out, Hanschen put a hand on his arm. “Look, I don’t know shit about fuck, and I’m the last person who should ever give emotional advice, but if you ever wanna, like, talk about anything, you can talk to me. I know I’m kinda the worst sometimes, but I think I’m better than no one.”

“Thanks. I’ll remember that.” Moritz smiled. “And you’re definitely better than no one, Hanschen.” He left the car and was gone. 

Hanschen paused before putting the car back into drive. It was remarkable how an afternoon could make you feel closer to someone you barely knew.

**Author's Note:**

> did you enjoy this? did you Not? consider telling me so in a comment below or in a message to @bisexual-evanhansen on tumblr. or also don't, that's fine, too


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